Anderson Cooper subtly asks Hitchens, a renowned atheist, whether he may have moments of doubt as he contemplates death. Hitchens’s response: “If that comes, it will be when I’m very ill, when I’m half demented, either by drugs or pain where, I wouldn’t have control over what I say.” As Damon Linker paraphrases:

Any such conversion, if it happened, would be the product of a brain consumed by cancer and a body wracked by pain. It should not be taken seriously, in other words, as a genuine expression of the beliefs and desires of the man known as Christopher Hitchens. It should instead be dismissed as the deluded ramblings of someone driven out of his right mind by suffering and disease. And the statements of a man in such a state tell us nothing worth knowing, either about him or about God.

Stories of deathbed conversions abound in religious tradition. The idea that one comes face-to-face with God in the shadow of death is moving and profound. Yet, Hitchens seems to have a point. Isn’t the lucid, dispassionate, analytical reasoning of a healthy person more representative of his sincere belief than his desperate cry in a moment of extreme pain and distress? The answer goes to the heart of what Linker calls “the epistemology of religious truth”:

Hitchens impl[ies] that a person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself. This is the outlook of the scientist . . ., the philosopher, the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic. From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts. Far more reliable are the sober, critical reflections of a man in good health, protected from danger, insulated from threats to his well being.

Religion, however, is not about calmly, coolly, and dispassionately evaluating the facts. Although reason rightly plays an important role in religious thinking, the religious person does not derive God’s existence the way a physicist derives the law of gravity. The religious experience, at its core, is a primitive, basic awareness of God. This awareness is most acute when we recognize that we are ultimately fragile and weak, that our very ability to reason is undermined by our bodily limitations.

In this light, one can see why the deathbed conversion is such a powerful image, why faith in the shadow of death is the most genuine faith. Just as light shines through most brightly when there is nothing to obstruct its path, so too is God’s presence most apparent when death threatens to remove everything else.